The Stone of Farewell (61 page)

Pryrates' hairless brows shot up at this; Dinivan felt a moment of cold joy. Good. So the creature could still be surprised.

“Hear me!”
Ranessin's voice gained force, so that for a moment it seemed that not only the room had fallen silent, but the whole world with it, as though in that instant the candlelit table rode the very cusp of Creation. “This world—
your
world, the world you preach to us with your sly words—is not the world of Mother Church. We have long known of a dark angel who strides the earth, whose bleak hand reaches out to trouble all the hearts of Osten Ard—but
our
scourge is the Arch-fiend himself, the implacable foe of God's light. Whether your ally is truly our Enemy of countless millennia or just another vicious minion of darkness, Mother Church has always stood against his like ... and always shall.”

Everyone in the room seemed to hold their breath for an endless moment.

“You do not know what you say, old man.” Pryrates' voice was a sulfurous hiss. “You grow feeble and your mind wanders ...”

Shockingly, not one of the escritors raised their voices in protest or dissent. They stared, wide-eyed, as Ranessin leaned across the table and calmly engaged the priest's angry stare. Light seemed to quail and almost die throughout the banquet hall, leaving only the two illuminated, one scarlet, one white, their shadows stretching, stretching ...

“Lies, hatred, and greed,” the lector said softly. “They are familiar, age-old enemies. It matters not beneath whose banner they march.” He stood up, a slim, pale shape, and lifted a hand. Dinivan felt again the fierce, uncontrollable love that had driven him to bend his back in supplication before the mystery of Man's divine purpose, to bind his life over into the service of this humble and wonderful man, and to the church that lived in his person.

With cold deliberation, Ranessin drew the sign of the Tree in the air before him. The table seemed to shudder again beneath Dinivan's hand; this time he could not believe it the alchemist's doing. “You have opened doors that should have remained closed for all time, Pryrates,” the lector proclaimed. “In your pride and folly, you and the High King have brought a ponderous evil into a world which already groaned beneath a mighty burden of suffering. Our church—
my
church—will fight you for every soul, until the very Day of Weighing-Out dawns. I declare you
excommunicate,
and King Elias with you, and also banish from the arms of Mother Church any who follow you into darkness and error.” His arm swept down, once, twice.
“Duos Onenpodensis, Feata Vorum Lexeran. Duos Onenpodensis, Feata Vorum Lexeran!”

No clap of thunder of horn of judgment followed the Lector's booming words, only the distant peal of the Clavean bell tolling the hour. Pryrates stood slowly, his face pale as wax, his mouth twisted in a trembling grimace.

“You have made a horrible mistake,” he rasped. “You are a foolish old man and your great Mother Church is a child's toy made of parchment and glue.” He was quivering with surprised fury. “We shall put a torch to it ere long. The howling will be great when it burns.
You have made a mistake.”

He turned and stalked from the dining hall, his bootheels clocking on the tiled floor, his robes billowing like flame. Dinivan thought he heard a terrible intimation of holocaust in the priest's departing footsteps, of a great and final conflagration, a black scorching of the pages of history.

Miriamele was sewing a wooden button onto her cloak when someone rapped on the door. Startled, she slid off the cot and padded to answer, her bare feet chill against the cold floor.

“Who is it?”

“Open the door, Prin ... Malachias. Please open the door.”

She drew the bolt. Cadrach stood in the poorly lit hallway, his sweaty face gleaming in the candlelight. He pushed past her into the small cell and elbowed the door shut so abruptly that Miriamele felt a breeze as it swept by her nose.

“Are you mad?” she demanded. “You cannot just push in like this!”

“Please, Princess ...”

“Get out! Now!”

“Lady ...” Astonishingly, Cadrach fell to his knees. His normally ruddy face was quite pale. “We must flee the Sancellan Aedonitis. Tonight.”

She stared down. “You
have
gone mad.” Her tone was imperious. “What are you talking about? Have you stolen something? I don't know if I should protect you any longer, and I certainly will not go charging out of...”

He cut her off in mid-speech. “No. It is nothing I have done—at least, nothing I have done tonight—and the danger is not to me so much as to you. But that danger is very great. We must flee!”

For several moments Miriamele could not think of a thing to say. Cadrach indeed looked very frightened, a change from his usual veiled expression.

He broke the silence at last. “Please, my lady, I know I have been a faithless companion, but I have done some good, as well. Please trust me this once. You are in terrible danger!”

“Danger from what?”

“Pryrates is here.”

She felt a wave of relief wash over her. Cadrach's wild words had frightened her after all. “Idiot. I know that. I spoke to the lector yesterday. I know all about Pryrates.”

The stocky monk rose to his feet. His jaw was set in a very determined way. “That is one of the most foolish things you have ever said, Princess. You know very little about him, and you should be grateful for that. Grateful!” He reached out and seized her arm.

“Stop that! How dare you!” She tried to slap at his face, but Cadrach leaned away from the blow, maintaining his grip. He was surprisingly strong.

“Saint Muirfath's Bones!” he hissed. “Don't be such a fool, Miriamele!” He leaned toward her, holding her gaze with his own wide eyes. There was, she fleetingly noticed, no smell of wine about him. “If I must treat you like a child, I will,” the monk growled. He pushed her backward until she toppled onto the cot, then stood over her, angry yet fearful. “The lector has declared Pryrates and your father excommunicate. Do you know what that means?”

“Yes!” she said, her voice almost a shout. “I'm glad!”

“But Pryrates is not glad, and something bad will happen. It will happen very soon. You should not be here when it does.”

“Bad? What do you mean? Pryrates is alone in the Sancellan. He came with half a dozen of my father's guardsmen. What can he do?”

“And you claim to know all about him.” Cadrach shook his head in disgust, then turned and began scooping Miriamele's loose clothing and few possessions into her traveling bag. “I, for one,” he said, “do not want to see whatever he will be getting up to.”

She watched him for a moment, dumbfounded. Who was this person who looked like Cadrach, but shouted and ordered and grabbed her arm like a river-barge bravo? “I will not go anywhere until I talk to Father Dinivan,” she said at last. Some of the edge had disappeared from her voice.

“Splendid,” Cadrach said. “Whatever you wish. Just prepare yourself to go. I'm sure that Dinivan will agree with me—if we can find him at all.”

Reluctantly, she bent to help him. “Just tell me this,” she said. “Do you swear that we're in danger? And that it's not something you did?”

He stopped. For the first time since he had entered the room, Cadrach's odd half-smile appeared, but this one twisted his face into a mask of terrible sorrow. “We have all done things that we regret, Miriamele. I have made mistakes that set God the Highest to weeping on His great throne.” He shook his head, angry at wasting time with talk. “But this danger is real and immediate, and there is nothing we can either of us do to make it less. Thus, we shall flee. Cowards always survive.”

Seeing his face, Miriamele suddenly did not ever want to know what Cadrach had done to make him hate himself so much. She shuddered and turned away, looking for her boots.

 

The Sancellan Aedonitis seemed strangely deserted, even for the late evening hour. A few priests had gathered in the various common rooms where they sat gossiping in hushed tones; a handful more strode the corridors with lighted candles, on errands of one sort or another. Except for these few, the halls were empty. The torches burned fitfully in their sockets, as though troubled by restless breezes.

Miriamele and Cadrach were in a deserted upstairs gallery, passing from the chambers where visiting churchmen stayed and into the administrative and ceremonial heart of God's House, when the monk pulled Miriamele over to a shadowed window alcove.

“Put the candle down and come look,” he said quietly. She wedged the taper in a crevice between two tiles and leaned forward. The cold air struck her face like a slap.

“What should I look at?”

“There, below. Do you see all those men with torches?” He tried to point within the confines of the narrow window. Miriamele could see at least a score of men in the courtyard below, amored and cloaked, bearing spears on their shoulders.

“Yes,” she said slowly. The soldiers did not appear to be doing much more than warming their hands at the courtyard fire-cairns. “So?”

“Those are from Duke Benigaris' household guard,” Cadrach said grimly. “Someone is expecting trouble tonight, and expecting it to be here.”

“But I thought soldiers were never allowed to bear arms in the Sancellan Aedonitis.” The spearpoints caught the torchlight like tongues of flame.

“Ah, but Duke Benigaris himself is a guest here tonight, since he attended the lector's banquet.”

“Why didn't he go back to the Sancellan Mahistrevis?” She stepped away from the drafty window. “It's not very far.”

“An excellent question,” Cadrach replied, a sour smile playing over his shadow-striped face. “Why indeed?”

Duke Isgrimnur tested Kvalnir's keen edge with his thumb and nodded with satisfaction. He slipped his whetstone and jar of oil back into his bag. There was something very calming about sharpening his sword. A pity he had to leave it behind. He sighed and wrapped it in rags once more, then pushed it underneath his pallet.

Not that Isgrimnur was going to see the lector directly. It was very unlikely that a strange monk would be allowed into the Shepherd of Mother Church's bedchamber, but Dinivan's chambers were close by. The lector's secretary had no guards. Also, Dinivan knew Isgrimnur and thought highly of him. When the priest realized who his late-night visitor really was, he would listen carefully to what the duke had to say.

Still, Isgrimnur felt his stomach fluttering, as it had before countless battles. That had been the reason he'd brought out his sword: Kvalnir hadn't been unsheathed more than twice since he'd left Naglimund, and certainly hadn't seen any duty that would have dulled her Dverning-forged blade, but honing his sword gave a man something to do when the waiting became difficult. There was something in the air tonight, a queasy expectancy that reminded Isgrimnur of the shores of Clodu during the Battle of the Lakelands.

Even King John, blooded war-hawk that he was, had been nervous
that
night, knowing that ten thousand Thrithings-men waited somewhere in the darkness beyond the sentry fires, and knowing also that the plains-dwellers were no adherents of orderly dawn starting-times for battles or any other such conventions of civilized warfare.

Prester John had come to the fire that night, joining his young Rimmersman friend—Isgrimnur had not yet inherited his father's dukedom—for a jug of wine and a bit of conversation. As they talked, the king had taken stone and polishing rag to fabled Bright-Nail. They spent the night yarning away, a little self-consciously at first, with many a pause to listen for unusual noises, then with increasing ease as dawn approached and it became obvious the Thrithings-men planned no nighttime raids.